A correctional officer who bonded with Ashley Smith shook with frustration as she told the inquest into Smith’s death that many aspects of the system must be changed.

Melissa Mueller told the jury she and her colleagues are in over their heads at Kitchener’s Grand Valley Institute for Women, where Smith died in 2007.

Mueller said there are inmates who need a level of help that she doesn’t know how to provide.

“We can’t go to work and be everything to everybody,” she said. “We’re just people and I don’t know how to fix those problems.”

Smith was part of Mueller’s caseload, but Mueller wasn’t involved in the decision-making process regarding the 19-year-old.

When Jocelyn Speyer, the coroner’s lawyer, asked if Mueller thought her input could have made a difference, she replied: “It might have.”

Constant reprimands from management about their handling of Smith made prison staff doubt how they should deal with her, Mueller said.

Despite her attempts to document Smith’s purple-tinged face and bloodshot eyes that bulged out of their sockets as a result of her ligature-tying, Mueller said managers didn’t want staff to intervene.

“As much as the direction was ridiculous, clearly ridiculous, you start to fall in line with it,” she said.

The inquiry has heard that entering Smith’s cell would usually produce a “use of force” report. The inquest has heard the suggestion that the directive to stay out of Smith’s cell unless she stopped breathing aimed to lower the number of reports the prison generated.

Speyer asked Mueller if she believed she and her colleagues ever unnecessarily entered Smith’s cell.

“I didn’t think so,” Mueller replied. “When she ties a ligature around her neck, she must be doing some damage.”

The harm Smith did to herself was a theme picked up by Julian Roy, lawyer for the Smith family.

Roy pointed out that Mueller had once tried to get Smith to look in the mirror and see what tying ligatures around her neck had done to her face. The blood vessels in her face had popped, making it seem swollen, Mueller said. Smith refused to look.

“I don’t ever believe it was Ashley’s intention to kill herself,” Mueller said. She later reiterated a conversation she brought up Tuesday about how Smith said she “knew what she was doing” when she choked herself with the ligatures.

When asked by Howard Rubel, lawyer for the union that represents prison guards, why she didn’t leave her job, Mueller said she didn’t want her two children to see her quit.

“I needed to go back and work with people who … already lived it,” she said.

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